


smile (the worst is yet to come)

by coincidental



Series: The University AU [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Sexual Dysfunction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:54:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22345936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coincidental/pseuds/coincidental
Summary: When Caleb is like this, Fjord almost forgets the ways he’s falling apart. The sunlight renders him into something poetic and belonging to a storybook, the sadness in his features the creasing line between the brows of a tragic hero, the golden light catching in his hair in a halo of burning copper making him the weary saint of a stained glass window. It’s beautiful, but Fjord’s heart aches for a smile instead.Fjord is hungover, Caleb is falling apart, sometimes you can fix things, and sometimes you can’t.
Relationships: Fjord/Caleb Widogast
Series: The University AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608193
Comments: 22
Kudos: 89





	smile (the worst is yet to come)

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of people wanted more of this AU, so I’ve been picking at this for ages. It’s not necessary to read ‘slow motion’ to get this I think, but it does reference it.
> 
> Not beta read so all mistakes are my own. 
> 
> Hope y’all enjoy!  
> x

Fjord shifts the weight of his heavy rucksack, grateful to see the library entrance up ahead. The bag on his back is laden down with weighty books he had checked out for an essay and largely forgotten about until a prompting email appeared crowing a warning about fines. It’s earlier than he would normally find himself in the main campus buildings, the halls quieter, tired eyed students immersed in travel cups of coffee or loitering outside doors with cigarettes between their lips. 

He’s pulled almost to a halt as a flood of students emerge from a lecture hall on one side of the corridor, their more lively burble of conversation indicating they’ve been awake longer than most of the people they’re interrupting, Fjord amongst them. 

He grumbles irritably, frowning until he catches sight of a familiar coppery bright head of tousled hair, tugged up in a scruffy loop.  
“Hey Caleb,” he raises his voice just enough to be heard over the chatter, finding alert blue eyes swinging around to fix him in their spotlight stare. Fjord raises a hand in greeting and smiles as much as he can muster. It’s hardly half-past nine in the morning and the previous night’s rugby social event has Fjord longing for his bed or a greasy fry up, maybe both. 

Caleb pauses in the stream of moving people and Fjord watches as they continue past him, busy, unnoticing. Fjord wonders how they pass him by so easily, how none of them seems to pat his shoulder or say goodbye, he wonders if Caleb has friends on his degree course, uncharitable though the question sounds. 

When there is nothing left between them but clean nondescript linoleum, Fjord closes the distance, smiles brighter.  
“Mornin, that’s sure an early lecture?” Caleb shrugs and tucks the arm of his reading glasses into the stretched out neck of his tee-shirt. It looks too large on him and Fjord wonders, almost absently, if it belongs to Wulf again.  
“Well, apparently it’s too busy to have a later slot, so we make do.” Caleb’s blue sky eyes are alert, engaged, his posture eerily still, like he’s poised to launch into movement at any moment. “I am used to it now,” he concedes with a shrug that looks odd on him. Fjord huffs an awkward laugh.   
“Well shit, I’d hate it. I’m still sufferin’ from last night’s misdemeanours, ain’t you? Coulda sworn you were out with Beau and her new friends.” 

Caleb’s shrug says nothing much, but Fjord has hazy memories of Caleb’s head tipped back in a laugh seen from across the room, sandwiched between Beau’s roller derby friend, tall Yasha with the slow sweet smile, and a stranger Fjord half recognised as another friend of a friend with their tattooed arm snug around Caleb’s waist. Caleb had more than one empty glass in front of him, another in his hand. Fjord wonders now if that stranger went home with Caleb, if they saw the way his hands tremble when he’s tired, if they cared.

Fjord clears his throat, shifts the heavy bag on his shoulder - the strap is beginning to bite in, an unrepentant ache.  
“I gotta return some books, but if you wanna give me a minute, we could go get breakfast?” Caleb looks mildly surprised, wetting his lips distractedly and shrugging once more. His shoulders are surprisingly broad for a guy who makes himself exist in such a small way, plaid shirt oversized and hanging from him. Fjord wonders if he does it deliberately, makes himself unassuming, unremarkable. It only hides so much, because Fjord has never thought of Caleb as unremarkable, quite the opposite.   
“Ja, that would be alright. I could do with picking up some titles that were recommended in my lecture.” Caleb seems to hesitate, and his eyes meet Fjord, periwinkle, summer sky, forget me not. The colour blue never used to make Fjord’s breath catch. “If that is okay?” 

Fjord smiles like Caleb hasn’t gotten so far under his skin it’s hard to imagine a time Caleb was not in his periphery.  
“Yeah, course, I don’t mind Cay. What’re they about?” 

They make their way into the library as Caleb explains, his soft accented voice detailing texts on magical theory and arcane history. Fjord watches him talk, then feels like he’s being creepy, averting his eyes. 

Fjord is grateful that the automated machines in the library make returning his books so easy, avoiding the disappointed stare of a staff member when they see how long he’s had the books in question. It’s not as if they could truly know he’s not opened them the whole time, but he feels as though they might, somehow. 

Caleb loiters patiently, his eyes locked onto the screen of his mobile, thumbs tapping out a message. His lips tighten fractionally, but the expression is gone as he tucks the phone away and looks up at Fjord.  
“Done, ja?” Fjord nods, shouldering his now blessedly lightweight rucksack and tucking his hands into his pockets. Caleb nods in response and he strides off towards the stairs that lead to the upper library floors. Fjord follows. 

The stairwell echoes with their heavy footsteps and the sunlight that filters in through the strangely narrow windows is slowly growing golden. It limns the shape of Caleb ahead of Fjord on the stairs like he's made more of magic than human flesh and bone.

Caleb slips through the requisite door like a ghost, catching it with a hand so it doesn’t make a sound, wary of even the soft close hinges apparently. He glances back at Fjord expectantly. 

Fjord follows, wary of slowly allowing the door to close behind him, fingers slipping from the wood as it quietly _snicks_ into place. 

Caleb treats the library with more reverence than a church. Full length windows flood the floor with light, the quiet disturbed only by the crisp turn of pages, the shuffle of papers, the tap of a computer keyboard. Fjord feels like holding his breath up here, the kind of space he normally hurries in and out of in busy disquiet apparently the space where Caleb fits, seamlessly.

When Caleb is like this, Fjord almost forgets the ways he’s falling apart. The sunlight renders him into something poetic and belonging to a storybook, the sadness in his features the creasing line between the brows of a tragic hero, the golden light catching in his hair in a halo of burning copper making him the weary saint of a stained glass window. It’s beautiful, but Fjord’s heart aches for a smile instead. 

Caleb’s fingers skim the spine of the books and he plucks them neatly from the shelves one by one. Fjord trails along with him, arms open to collect the academic cargo. The first time Caleb turns to Fjord, who waits with outstretched open hands, has the smallest hint of amused surprise tugging at Caleb’s mouth.

It’s better. He’s not a tragic poetic hero with that smile, he’s a sad boy that Fjord would really really like to kiss. 

Caleb is well practiced in sourcing reading material and makes short work of collecting up the ones he wants, only making one brief attempt to take them off Fjord on the way downstairs before allowing the moment of stilted chivalry. Fjord allows him to scan them through the check out machine and into his own rucksack though, still remembering the phantom ache of his shoulders from lugging in his own reading list to hand back. 

“So.” They head from the library and out of the university through a large revolving door. The air outside is crisp and the sun, still rising slow, casts long early shadows. “You good for a greasy fry up for breakfast?”

Fjord nudges Caleb gently and stirs him from his eerie stillness, causing him to turn, eyes disconcertingly focused.  
“Ja, alright. Whatever you want.”

The road adjacent to the university is bustling and bohemian, eschewing the more proper nature of the city, catering to the students and the liberally minded. It is dotted with tiny cafes, independent bakeries, secondhand bookshops and stores that overflow with second hand and vintage clothing. The odd chain shop sits at odds amongst its neighbours, incongruous albeit not unused. 

Fjord heads for a greasier cafe in search of creaking wooden chairs that have seen better days, linoleum floors and laminated menus. It looks like the sort of place to walk past, but anyone worth their salt knows the food is good.

Many nights have been resolved there the morning after, Beau’s head resting on the cool tabletop and Nott sullenly cradling cheap black coffee to her chest like a lifeline while they wait for breakfast to appear. 

“I’m buyin’ so pick what you want.” Caleb arches a brow at him over the top of the menu and Fjord echoes the expression. “Don’t gimme that look Cay, ain’t trying to insult you, just want to buy you breakfast.” Caleb makes a soft sound, half agreement, half a huff. 

The cafe is quiet enough, the kitchen bustle behind a door, sound escaping in short bursts of warm air that smells of cooking food whenever someone comes through. It has Fjord’s stomach gurgling. That is the first thing that seems to make Caleb smile, a small thing, tucked into the corner of his mouth like he has no intention of sharing it.  
“Laughin’ at me Widogast?” Fjord rumbles, but there’s amusement in it and he nudges his knee against Caleb’s beneath the table.   
“No, I was not,” Caleb protests.   
“I saw the smile, cause you heard my stomach growling huh? I’m a growing boy you know.” That earns Fjord a brief eye roll and a little sigh, a smile returning like a fleeting glimpse of sun on a cloudy day. 

“If you grow much more they will not want to lift you for the line-out on the pitch.” Fjord blinks slowly, his butter yellow gaze sharply curious.   
“Didn’t know you’d seen me play?” he probes, careful. The query brings the mildest flush to Caleb’s face.   
“Ja, ah, I do not remember when. It- looked quite good- that is, you played well.” 

Fjord cannot help the easy grin that curves his mouth at that. The idea of Caleb watching him play rugby is oddly brilliant. Part of him imagines Caleb standing pitch side with the other partners and friends at matches, wrapped in one of his massive scarves and cheering for Fjord. He likes it, but it feels a million miles from this, from what they are. 

Across the table from him Caleb sets the menu down.   
“You picked?” Despite the still way he holds himself, the bright engaged focus of his blue eyes, Fjord sees Caleb’s hands are shaking, fine tremors that he stills with his fingers twisting together.   
“Yes, I have picked.” 

Fjord catches the eye of the waitress across the room, a middle-aged woman with a hint of something non human in her pupil-less eyes, a well worn smile on her lips as she approaches and clicks her pen in and out twice before opening the notepad she conjures from her apron pocket.   
“What can I get for you guys?” Fjord orders a large fry up, one he anticipates already will be greasy and satisfying, punctuating the handing back of his menu with a boyish polite smile. The waitress is suitably charmed by it as she is every time Fjord visits.   
“Ah, for me only some toast with butter and jam, and a tea, please.” Caleb hands the menu back and tucks his hands together. She looks bemused.   
“Nothing else love? You need to get more of an appetite like this one,” she pats Fjord’s shoulder in a way that feels vaguely motherly and laughs before gathering the menus to her ample chest. “Alright then, I’ll sort it.”

“Not hungry?” Fjord asks as the waitress heads into the kitchen to impart their order. Caleb’s shoulders twitch in the barest approximation of a shrug and Fjord hates it and he cannot place why in the least.   
“Not especially,” Caleb remarks, his timbre a soft stilted roll, meandering its way uncomfortably around words that sound a little ill formed on his lips, a crispness to close the gap left by his accent. “I do not have a, ah, a big appetite.”  
“Even with what you smoke?” The question careens out without Fjord’s say so, a tactless horse without a rider. He flushes a little, but Caleb stares at him with slow surprise that is followed by a sound which Fjord can only read as a laugh. It’s short, barked, a little hoarse, louder he thinks than Caleb intends.  
“Even with what I smoke,” Caleb confirms more softly.

Fjord finds often with Caleb that they lapse into comfortable silence, and with the arrival of their drinks, his own coffee and Caleb’s tea, it is exactly so. 

Caleb’s shaking hands curl around the worn mug. He just blows on the hot liquid, Fjord isn’t sure he sees him drink.

It affords Fjord a moment though, to admire the quiet downcast copper of Caleb’s eyelashes and the freckled bump of his once broken nose, the sweet purse of his chapped pink mouth as he blows over his tea, the elegant pale clasp of his fingers around the old mug - Caleb’s hands are an artist’s hands to Fjord, more than a scholar or academic. Fjord wonders if he can play violin, fingers deft on the strings, or piano, elegant and intent. He wonders if he can paint or draw. He could ask, but then Caleb would look up and Fjord would have to _stop_ looking. 

Their food arrives in short order, in such a way that only further cements the strange passage of time in tucked away cafes like this, that weird sensation you get where you’re not sure how long you’ve been there and the clock seems not to have moved but it’s been hours… You’re sure. And yet, it’s been minutes, how can anything be ready yet. 

Caleb butters the toast with a lack of precision that bewilders Fjord. He expects a decisive precision, a butter all the way to the edges attitude, and neat layering of jam. Caleb defies him utterly with a messy melting cacophony of butter gracelessly smeared across the bread and an equally messy daub of jam. 

Caleb takes a bite from it in a manner that seems more perfunctory than hungry and sets the slice back on the plate, glancing at Fjord. Fjord has hardly touched his own food yet, too baffled and singularly entranced by the unwieldy massacre of Caleb buttering toast - apparently one thing he does do badly. 

Fjord’s own breakfast is the kind of greasy that settles his stomach and he makes quick work of it. His appetite is wolffish sometimes, particularly in the wake of a heavy night out or a game of sport, and this being the former, it puts him in better stead for the day. 

Mopping up the last of what’s on his place with a piece of his own buttered toast - a smear of beans sauce, golden yellow yolk and ketchup - Fjord sits back with a contented sound. Caleb’s hands are pale knuckled on his mug and his toast has one more smaller bite from it.  
“You gonna eat some more of that?” Fjord queries, casual as he can make it, taking a swig from his now blessedly cooler cup of coffee. 

Caleb doesn’t so much as lift his head as he glances up through his lashes and his shoulders twitch in a shrug. He’s drawn, pale, but perhaps more so than usual, and his eyes look too deeply in their sockets in the fluorescent glare of the cafe. Fjord can take a hint, he can take pity, he just needs to make sure Caleb never sees it that way. 

“If you’re not havin’ any more, shall we get goin?” Fjord digs his wallet out from his hoodie pouch pocket. “I could really go for like. Tea and dumb tv or video games. Wanna come back to mine?”

If Fjord can get Caleb to come with him, then he feels like he can do something about the way his hands tremble and the tired bruising of his eyes and the peculiar alert stillness to him, the way he’s holding himself on a knife edge. It makes Fjord tense to watch and he cannot imagine how it feels to exist like that. 

It occurs to him that it may be an enhanced state and his golden eyes skim over his friend again. It wouldn’t surprise him, not with Caleb living with Astrid and Eodwulf. Not at all. 

He doesn’t know, not for sure, but there is a sheen to Caleb that sits all wrong and Fjord thinks he may be right but he can’t _ask_ . Because you don’t just ask things like that. _So hey, Caleb, what drugs are you coming down from?_ It would bode badly, Fjord is sure. 

Caleb’s fingers unfold from around the mug and he twists them together in his lap.   
“Ja, I will come and keep you company, sure.” Something about his returned gaze is arresting and steady and the blue of his eyes seems heavy and dark. Fjord cannot place the feeling it gives, the bulk of something sharp edged that shifts his chest. 

The walk from the cafe to the place Fjord shares with Jester, Beau and Nott is not a long one. His and Caleb’s long legs eat up the pavement before them in steady long strides, hands buried into their pockets and few words exchanged. 

The bustle of the street gives way to ever fewer shops and more quiet residential roads, uniform terraced houses fighting for space down the largely empty streets. They pass the odd person walking a dog, strangers with prams and toddling children clustered at the entry to a church hall, the lone student with mismatched layers and laden rucksack whizzes by on a bike. Caleb and Fjord don’t talk. 

Fjord’s student house is sandwiched between almost identical others, painted a once white with slightly chipping windowsills, a somewhat overgrown front box garden and a burgundy front door. A box of rain damp recycling sits in the midst of the bedraggled patch of grass, mostly full of empty glass bottles and pizza boxes. 

Fjord digs keys from his rucksack and wrestles open the stiff lock, the front door given way to a dim entry way. The quiet is punctuated with the uncanny echo of a laugh track from front room, the door cracked open. 

On a lumpy floral sofa, its original ditsy print peeking from beneath mismatched pillows and gigantic throws, Jester and Nott are curled beneath a shared blanket. Both look rumpled and sleepy, Jester offering a cheery wave and a yawn, the blanket slipping to reveal pastel pink Disney pyjamas with a prissy white cat declaring she is not a fan of mornings. They elicit a tiny smile at the corner of Caleb’s mouth.   
“Hiiii.” Jester’s greeting is sweet but subdued, still obviously sleepy. Nott yawns and waves vaguely but does not move her luminous large eyes from the screen. (Ross gets caught trying to rescue his salmon shirt from his ex girlfriend. The laugh track sounds. Nott squints.)

“We’re gonna hang upstairs,” Fjord gestures vaguely upward with his thumb and Nott’s yellow eyes finally slide slowly to regard them.   
“Be good,” she intones with an unreadable expression. Fjord glances at Caleb and sees him giving Nott an equally peculiar look back. He can parse neither. He forgets sometimes that the two of them are friends. 

Shuffling from the room, he drops his rucksack on the floor and kicks off his trainers. His socked feet shuffle on the laminate floors as he shuffles through to the cluttered kitchen. He hears the soft sounds of Caleb doing the same behind him and he swings open the fridge. 

The chill air washes out and the old unit hums loudly. He snags a cold can of Coke and turns, offering one out to Caleb. He finds the other boy closer than expected, hands buried in the sleeves of his plaid shirt and brows drawn together. Caleb accepts the proferred can with his hands still encased in his sleeves. 

Upstairs, Fjord’s bedroom is the familiar mixture of carefully organised disarray. Neat shelves and a made bed contend with a deliberately discarded jacket over the back of a chair and a pair of shoes tucked, askew, beneath the edge of a radiator.

Caleb peers about with interest and Fjord is unsurprised to see him make a beeline for the scant books decorating Fjord’s desk. Fjord, for his part, sits at the head of his double bed with his legs stretched out and his shoulders against the headboard, watching.   
“You do not, ah, have many books...” Caleb remarks over a moment when the few he’s found seem to prove uninteresting and no more can be seen. He turns, the can of coke still unopened in his hands.   
“Don’t read that much Cay,” Fjord confesses, an easy quiet to his voice. The house is a carpeted soft kind of silence on the upper floor, the barest hint of the television murmuring beneath them. “Did you wanna like, play something on my Xbox or whatever?”

After last time- last time with the tangled charge of their emotions, bodies gravitating together with the taste of smoke on their tongues, Fjord shouldn’t be surprised when Caleb chooses to be bold. 

He admits at least that the bed is more comfortable than Caleb’s back stoop or living room floor. 

Caleb doesn’t answer his question about the Xbox. He sets down his coke on the desk top and crawls onto the bed from the foot, making his way up with his knees bracketing Fjord’s hips and his hands sinking into the duvet. 

Fjord wants to be a good friend and he thinks a good friend should talk to Caleb about this, talk to him about his shaking hands and his faraway eyes and the way he looks like he’s not slept properly in weeks. Fjord wants to be more than Caleb’s friend, truth be told, but he won’t tell that truth. He clenches that truth between his teeth until his jaw aches with it. 

Caleb’s shaking cool fingers find his cheeks, his jaw, cradle it to draw Fjord forward. (He goes, drawn inexorably and willingly.) The kiss is warm, slow to start on Fjord’s part and strangely demanding on Caleb’s, his thin lips a hungry defiant press, tongue eagerly seeking out the parted seam of Fjord’s mouth and pressing open, in, against. 

It’s not that it’s not good, it is. It _really_ is. Fjord likes kissing Caleb. This isn’t why he wanted Caleb to come home with him though. It’s hardly even mid morning and Caleb is- he’s- Fjord doesn’t know what he is. 

“Hey, hey,” it’s hard to break the kisses to speak, Fjord’s lips mashing against Caleb’s kisses as he tries, “slow down, easy, Cay, easy babe.” _Babe_. Fjord didn’t mean to say it. That makes Caleb draw back, just for a beat, one brow ticked up in query. Fjord flushes, a ruddy browning of his verdant cheeks.  
“Babe?” Caleb echoes, already leaning back in, thumbs smoothing over Fjord’s hot face. The endearment sounds foolish repeated, but Caleb’s next kiss is slower, softer, a sweet catching of his lips against Fjord’s. It ignites a heat in his belly, in his gut, a molten hook that draws his absent hands up to stroke along the lovely line of Caleb’s spine and find purchase on the delicate jut of his hips. 

They sink into the mattress and Fjord’s better instincts are lost beneath the muscle memory of what it feels to have Caleb wanting and pliant beneath him. He rolls, the easy bracket of Caleb’s jeans clad thighs drawing him to settle against the cradling firmness of his body. 

“Not how I saw my morning going Cay,” he murmurs, tasting the line of his jaw as his head tips back. His open mouth is hot and slow Caleb’s neck when he feels the sure touch of hands at his waistband, Caleb’s bold touch sure as he undoes Fjord’s jeans and his cool fingers press inside. 

Fjord is so startled he can do nothing but grunt briefly in surprise. A confused low groan is lost to Caleb’s throat as Caleb cups and palms him though the thin skin warm jersey of his underwear.   
“Cay- ah, bit fast?” Another confident movement of Caleb’s hand has his body disagreeing and Fjord wheezes a breathless half groan.   
“You do not want to?” He cannot see Caleb’s face but something in his tone is flatly confused, hurt. “Last time was… gut, good.” Caleb’s cool fingers cease their restless touches, neither going away nor distracting Fjord unduly.   
“It was.” Fjord cannot disagree, a memory of smoke softened kisses and hard hands, fragile wrists and Caleb’s head tipped back to show a stretch of pale freckled throat in perfectly messy submission. 

“So…” Caleb voice is invitingly intimate and he lifts his head to nose at Fjord’s jaw and kiss his cheek, a dry brush of his lips. Fjord sinks into it, his reservations crumpling like ash beneath the weight of that simple kiss. His hips roll uncertainly into the sweet pressure of Caleb’s cool elegant fingers and his friend takes the hint. 

It’s easy to find the rhythm between them, soft panting breaths between wet firm kisses that linger and drag and hardly part between breaths, Fjord rocking easily into Caleb’s touches, quickly growing hard under the insistent stroke of his clever fingers.

He shifts to kiss down that pale stretch of throat and the unsteady swallow Caleb makes as Fjord’s lips find his collarbone, stretching the collar of his tee, his own hands busily making light of the fastenings on Caleb’s jeans. For a beat, Fjord can’t figure out what’s wrong, but he does. Caleb’s not hard, not even a little. 

He pauses, breathing unsteady pulling back, thumb rubbing a restless back and forth over the skin of Caleb’s belly, just beneath the waistband of his underwear but no lower.   
“You okay? You’re not-“ Caleb turns his face away and Fjord sees the hectic red flush of his cheeks, the embarrassment sinking its way down his neck.   
“Ja-“ Caleb’s words catch thick in his throat and he swallows audibly. “I want- this is good, can you just- “  
“You want me to keep goin’, Cay?” Caleb nods, then grits out a visibly uncomfortable verbal response.   
“Ja, please do not stop.”

Fjord continues the slow trek of his fingers, down, slower still than before even, sinking them beneath the fabric to seek out warm skin. Caleb shifts beneath him, breath hitching but his slow touches garner no response. A frown draws together Caleb’s brows and Fjord tries to ease it with distracting kisses to his jaw, to the corner of his mouth.   
“Can I try somethin’? You tell me to stop if you need me to.” Caleb’s expression is fraught with frustration and his body is beginning to tense like a bowstring. Fjord doesn’t understand but he hates the unhappy turn of Caleb’s mouth, remembering the way it had fallen open, slack and moaning, the last time they did this. Despite everything, ready for Caleb to call it off any moment, Fjord sees him nod instead, ears red with the force of his flush. 

Shifting down the bed, duvet rumpling beneath his knees, Fjord pushes up Caleb’s plaid shirt and tee, kissing his belly, feeling the tightly controlled short shifts of breath as the man beneath him inhales and exhales. He kisses again and the hair below Caleb’s navel tickles his lips. Caleb twitches beneath him, body jerking as though in surprise. 

Fjord’s eyes flicker up and are met by alert, laser focused blue. Caleb is not surprised, he is watching, intently. For half a breath Fjord drowns in it. 

Easing down underwear and jeans together in a graceless shimmy that Caleb haltingly assists when he comprehends, Fjord is able to curl his fingers properly around Caleb’s cock and dips his head down to tease his soft mouth over the head, a flick of his tongue. Caleb curses in his mother tongue and his head hits the pillow with a dull muffled _thump_. 

Fjord knows how this goes, even a slow beginning building to something soft and sweet and hot but it just- it doesn’t. He draws back and looks up.   
“Cay…” Perhaps his voice is too soft, perhaps he sounds pitying - he doesn’t mean to. 

Caleb curses in entirely a different tone and shifts on the bed, away from Fjord, yanking up his jeans and buttoning them. His hands are shaking so badly he struggles with the button. 

“Caleb, please let me help.” Fjord reaches out and Caleb flinches back. It’s so startling it feels like a sucker punch to the gut. Fjord’s own arousal is so absent he feels a little cold. “Caleb,” he repeats, hurt, quiet. He keeps his hands to himself. 

Caleb seems to crumple, fold inwards on himself like some paper facsimile of a person. 

This time he reaches out and it is not to find distrust and anger, but to find the wreckage of Caleb, fitting into his embrace. 

Fjord eases back into the pillows and brings Caleb with him, feeling Caleb’s face tucked into his neck, hit and smearing damply with tears. Fjord doesn’t comment, what is there to say to that? Caleb shakes in his arms, minute tremors like the seismic aftershock of an earthquake. The quake has toppled every last wall and Fjord wonders if he is supposed to feel glad that he gets to _see_ Caleb, but he doesn’t. This isn’t how he wanted it. Not a bit. 

“You- you need anything? You’re coming off something right, you got- I don’t know what this is Cay, you need more? Something else?” Caleb is shocky in his arms, strung tight and shaking like he is freezing. He shakes his head and Fjord feels it. “Alright, okay. We’re going to talk about this, we need to.” 

His words are lost in the soft mess of Caleb’s soft copper bright hair. He smells faintly like shampoo, cigarette smoke and something herbal and spiced, like incense.   
“Nicht jetzt. Bitte. Später.” Fjord doesn’t speak a lick of Zemnian but he gets the gist before Caleb repeats himself; “Later, please.” His voice is hoarse and thick with emotion, guttural almost, his accent heavy in a way he is normally more careful to disguise.   
“I mean it this time.” Fjord is tired, feels it in a way he didn’t even an hour ago.   
“I know.”

He doesn’t press more, not yet. He thinks the carefully built card castle Caleb had erected is in a scattered pile and it will take time to collect the pieces and arrange an order that makes sense. He only hopes that this time, this time Caleb will talk. 

Every time it happens, this collapse, this needy unravelling, Caleb simultaneously seems to grow closer to Fjord and yet impossibly further away. 

Fjord cards his fingers through Caleb’s hair until his shakes are hardly a faint vibration. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos make pushing through writers block easier.  
> Toss a comment to the fic writer?


End file.
